A Secular Age | Charles Taylor | A Catholic Defends the Secular

A Secular Age | Charles Taylor | A book for our times

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A Secular Age

	A Secular Age Charles Taylor Belknap Press, 2007 - 896 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Catholic Defends the Secular

If you have no previous experience of Charles Taylor, this is not the place to start: 872 pages are a heavy commitment, and Taylor is far from being a great writer. If you want your thinking challenged, try his short essay A Catholic Modernity?: Charles Taylor's Marianist Award Lecture, with responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, where he previews the argument that secularism actually makes for a fuller realization of Christ's teachings than Christianity allowed. Or, from a different perspective, try William Connolly's Why I Am Not a Secularist, which argues that secular principles are better realized by relaxing secularism.

That said, A Secular Age is vintage Taylor, tracing the roots of secularism deep into the furthest reaches of theology and tracing a series of complicated genealogies of modern thought. It's tough going, and Taylor does have a tendency to loop and qualify in the course of elaborating his claims. But if you have the patience for this kind of Hegel-inspired intellectual-philosophical history, you can count on having your thinking nuanced and complicated as well as encountering all sorts of nearly forgotten thinkers from across the Western tradition. It extends and completes some of the arguments advanced in his earlier Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

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A book for our times

Taylor sets himself the formidable task of exploring how we have come to dwell in a secular age, that is, one that sees the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing. His focus is on how the background context to the way we live our lives has been transformed. For many today, unbelief is the default option. This may have been the reflective stance of some in the past, but it was never the naive default option. Taylor is highly critical of what he calls `subtraction stories' according to which secular human nature emerged in pristine form by sloughing off ignorance and superstition. Against this he argues that what we see today is a new invention. Furthermore, this newly invented world is one that struggles to cope with the very issues (such as scapegoating violence) that it had hoped to have set aside. Though this is a long and complex book, it has held my attention and fascination as few others have in recent years. A pleasing feature is that it is quite free of the vitriol that is so typical of recent debates in this field.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4

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